Soffiyah Elijah

Soffiyah Elijah is an advocate, attorney, scholar, and educator, and the executive director of the Correctional Association of New York. Prior to joining the Correctional Association, Elijah served as deputy director and a clinical instructor at the Criminal Justice Institute at Harvard Law School. A native New Yorker, Elijah practiced criminal and family law in New York City for more than twenty years. She was a supervising attorney at the Neighborhood Defender Service of Harlem, where she defended indigent members of the Harlem community, and has also worked as a staff attorney for the Juvenile Rights Division of the Legal Aid Society. Honored by the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild in 2010, Elijah is recognized as an international authority on human rights issues and has served as a justice on several people’s tribunals focused on the U.S. government’s response to Hurricane Katrina, the testing of bombs in Vieques, Puerto Rico, and conditions of confinement inside American prisons.